BBC Four acquires Australian crime drama, Deep Water

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Now then, we all know that BBC4 is the original home for our foreign-language crime drama, but in recent years the channel has received competition from the likes of Sky, ITV Encore, Channel 4 and, of course, Walter Presents. But the channel still keep chugging away, filling its Saturday, 9pm slot with something meaty for us all to get stuck into. It may have made a name for itself with Scandinavian fare like The Killing and The Bridge, but now it seems that it has looked farther afield for its next hit.

We’ll have news later today about what will be starting up in that much-fabled slot, but after the show we’ll be talking about later, it seems BBC4 will be heading off Down Under. Television Business International reports that the channel has acquired four-part Australian series Deep Water.

In the 1980s and 90s a wave of murders bloodied the idyllic coastline of Sydney’s eastern suburbs. There were 80 murders, 30 unsolved cases and thousands of assaults. The victims: young homosexual men.

Deep Water is inspired by these true events, recontextualised to be set in contemporary Bondi.

When the body of a young man is found in a beachfront apartment in Bondi, Detectives Tori Lustigman (Yael Stone) and Nick Manning (Noah Taylor) are assigned the case. Is this brutal murder a domestic, a robbery gone wrong or something far more sinister?

As other ritualistic murders occur, they discover the killer is using a social networking app to entice his victims. Anyone using the app is now at risk, and it’s a race against the clock to catch the serial killer before he strikes again.

With mounting evidence to suggest the perpetrator has killed before, Tori and Nick start digging through old investigations. The discovery is shocking. They uncover up to 80 possible murders of men that took place in the 80s and 90s in NSW – unexplained deaths, ‘suicides’ and disappearances. Haunted by the disappearance of her teenage brother, Tori’s fascination with the case soon turns to fixation.

As they investigate past crimes, they become convinced that the current killer is somehow connected. In reopening the cold cases the detectives reveal the hidden truth about the past murders and uncover critical evidence leading to the killer. In doing so they finally give closure to the victims’ families by bringing the killers, both past and present, to justice.

Deep Water follows series two of The Code, which starts up in a few weeks time.